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Mal_Sovereign's avatar
9 years ago
Solved

Pixels flickering and then main menu freeze.

After 4 days of surfing and searching solutions in every answer found by google, coming up with nothing, I've decided to just directly ask for help.

My system:

HP Pavilion m6-1058ca
Intel(R) Core(TM) I5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz
6,00 GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 4000
AMD Radeon HD 7600M Series
(If you need more just ask)

Yeah, had it for 3-4 years? It's not specially the best laptop or the newest but it has always worked fine for any game I wanted to play (except Overwatch with their Intel HD Graphics 4400 requirement which is kind of dumb since I've read the difference is minimal).

The problem started when my graphic drivers decided to, I don't know, just break I guess (they had the yellow exclamation point). I'm not even sure what that was about but it was fixed when I updated to windows 10 (was in windows 7 before). The problem then was windows 10 giving me BSOD trying to play League of Legends with Memory_Management errors, and DA:O with pixels flickering and then freezing in the main menu (forcing me to hard reset the computer)

After spending the whole day updating drivers, running sfc/scannow, windows memory diagnostic and intense scan for virus, nothing worked. The drivers are all up to date.

I decided to just do a full on reset. After this reset and all the windows updates installed, the game was still not working. When I alt-tab away from DA:O so it doesn't freeze, it tells me that AMD stopped responding but has successfully recovered, again, also searched solutions for that and everything from AMD is updated.

So I decided to update to Windows 10 and give it another shot. Miracle! It worked for almost 2 days! Could play everything perfectly, with no problems at all. So that tells my system is adapted to play the game and I was just running in some problem.

Until 2 days ago where some update (system restore said it was something related to DirectX) decided to just break everything again. Tried to recover to the previous date where everything worked but it didn't fix it. Did again the whole update drivers, running scans, virus and etc, nothing, tried finding more solutions and still nothing. Decided to reset again, (which directly installed windows 10 and now I've lost the possibility to go back to windows 7), but this time it didn't fix anything.

I ran a DxDiag since someone told me it might come from that but it didn't show any errors, I have DirectX 11.2.


After so many days of trying by myself, I must be clearly missing something out, so I wanted to see if an actual profesional could help me.

Don't hesitate to ask for more informations, memory dumps or anything else you need. Thanks for your attention and sorry for the long post.

PS: Everything else works just fine, I just can't play any games (which is for what I mainly use that laptop).

  • EA_David's avatar
    EA_David
    9 years ago

    Thanks for the update. I suspect there may be some issues with the Radeon card. The only real steps to try are a clean driver install, but if this has no effect i fear that there's a physical issue with the card. 


    However it's not very powerful and if the HD4000 is doing its job acceptably then you should be ok going forward. 

3 Replies

  • EA_David's avatar
    EA_David
    Icon for Community Admin rankCommunity Admin
    9 years ago

    @Mal_Sovereign This is quite odd alright. My instinct is that it's a hardware error that expresses itself when running certain DX components, but I don't want to say definitely yet. The DAO issues obviously suggest rendering problems before the freeze, but the LoL BSODs stand out a lot more. Do you still get these now?

    Can you check whether you're using the Radeon 7600M or the HD4000? Generally the HD4000 will sit idle while the 7600M does the grunt work, if you disable one or the other as a test does that give useful info?

    Also are you grabbing drivers from the intel/AMD sites directly or are you using a package from HP? I know some time back there were some problems with Pavilions and their driver updates, but I haven't heard anything on it in a while, so I think it's no longer an issue. 

  • So, I honestly can't thank you enough because that worked.

    I tried disabling HD4000 first and it fixed the rendering issues but the frame rate in-game was really low even with everything in low settings (when I got to play I could play everything in Max just fine and with HD texture mods). I then tried disabling Radeon 7600M and it seems like that fixed it because both games run smoothly (No BSOD from LoL and I let it run for some minutes in a costume game).

    I don't know how to check which one it was using but it looks like it works just fine with the HD4000 by itself. I wouldn't want to sit with this fix in case it gives problems in a future, would it? And yes, I was grabbing the drivers directly from the official sites. 

  • EA_David's avatar
    EA_David
    Icon for Community Admin rankCommunity Admin
    9 years ago

    Thanks for the update. I suspect there may be some issues with the Radeon card. The only real steps to try are a clean driver install, but if this has no effect i fear that there's a physical issue with the card. 


    However it's not very powerful and if the HD4000 is doing its job acceptably then you should be ok going forward. 

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